Sexworkers As Political Footballs to Mislead on Trafficking

5/20/06 - The use of sex workers as political footballs continues unabated,
even among self-identified liberals. Nicholas Kristoff was at it again in
New York Times Op Ed page. Just like his comrades in the State Department,
whose praises he sings with an embarrassing effusiveness, Kristoff has let
his obsession with sex trafficking lead him to tinker with the facts. In his
zeal to exaggerate the phenom, he segues seamlessly from descriptions of girls
in prostitution to the global total of all trafficked people:

"I've seen the peddling of humans in many countries: the 8-year- old Filipino
girl whose mother used to pull her out of school to rent pedophiles; the terrified
14-year-old Vietnamese girl imprisoned in a brothel pending the sale of her
virginity; the Pakistani teenager whose brothel's owner dealt with her resistance
by drugging her into a stupor. The U.N. has estimated that 12.3 million people
worldwide are caught in forced labor of one kind or another."

According to UNICEF , a large part of that tally is trafficking of babies
for adoption in the West, trafficking of girls for mail-order brides, and
trafficking for domestic work. The significant trafficking busts in the United
States--the sinking of the Golden Venture, with its cargo of trafficked garment
workers; the New York City racket involving deaf Mexicans who were trafficked
to work as beggars on the subways--all involve adults forced into various
kinds of indentured servitude involving manual labor, not young girls forced
into brothels. UNICEF estimates that of the 246 million children engaged in
child labor worldwide, only about 1.8 million are engaged in prostitution
or pornography.

Those at the State Department and on the Christian right who have made sex
trafficking their top priority are not doing it to save those 246 million
kids from grinding labor in factories or as domestic servants. They're doing
it to serve a broader agenda of legislating morality and disempowering women.
And who's a better poster girl for that crusade than Kristoff's imprisoned
14-year-old?